Vintage Blue – serie

'A fantasy, a vivid dream...inventive and brilliant' GuardianHenri has a passion for Napoleon - but Napoleon has a passion for chicken. As soldier and emperor butcher their way across Europe, glory falls to ruin and love turns to hate.But, when Henri encounters the red-haired, web-footed Villanelle, he discovers in her an equal. Together they abandon their pasts, and flee to the Venetian canals to meet their singular destiny in the city of chance and disguises.'A deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so.' New York Times

Two gay lives, separated by class, age and history, begin to overlap. Hollinghurst turns biography into a portrait of desire, memory and inheritance. Young William Beckwith spends his time, and his trust fund, idly cruising London for erotic encounters. When he saves the life of an elderly man in a public convenience, an unlikely job opportunity presents itself. The man is Lord Nantwich, who is seeking a biographer. Will agrees to look through Nantwich’s diaries and finds himself drawn into a life that reaches back through Edwardian England, empire and the long history of gay repression. As Will uncovers Nantwich’s story, bitter truths begin to emerge about his own privileged existence, his family and the freedoms he takes for granted. Hollinghurst sets the pleasures of 1980s gay London against the lives that had to be hidden, prosecuted or half-erased before it. The result is a queer literary novel of unusual poise and force, alert to beauty, appetite and the uneasy inheritance of freedom.

'The most outrageously funny book about sex written' GuardianPortnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)]:A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.Portnoy's Complaint tells the tale of young Jewish lawyer Alexander Portnoy and his scandalous sexual confessions to his psychiatrist. As narrated by Portnoy, he takes the reader on a journey through his childhood to adolescence to present day while articulating his sexual desire, frustration and neurosis in shockingly candid ways. Hysterically funny and daringly intimate, Portnoy's Complaint was an immediate bestseller upon its publication and elevated Roth to an international literary celebrity.

In the arid summer heat, four children – Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom – find themselves abruptly orphaned. All the routines of childhood are cast aside as the children adapt to a now parentless world. Alone in the house together, the children’s lives twist into something unrecognisable as the outside begins to bear down on them.

Charles Highway is every mother's worst nightmare. Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets the aloof, wildly unattainable, Rachel.As Charles's twentieth birthday - and the Oxford entrance exams - loom, his plans for seducing Rachel will draw him into a private collection of obsessional notes and observations: the eponymous 'Rachel Papers'.WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD'Scurrilous, shameless and very funny' The Times Literary Supplement'Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving' Peter Ackroyd

Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, is in pursuit of his lost libido and heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobey a doctor's orders, he runs the full humiliating gamut of sex labs and trendy 'workshops', where more than souls are bared. He decks himself with cunning gadgetry, dreams up a weekly fantasy, pets diligently with his overweight wife and browses listlessly through porn magazines behind locked doors. Is sex really worth it? As liberationists abuse him, a campus hostess bores him into bed - and even his own wife starts acting oddly - Jake seriously begins to wonder.

Julia is a photographer; Chantal edits a fashion magazine; Helen is an academic, and Philippa is writing a novel. The best of friends, they meet at trendy cafes and restaurants to eye the passing talent and to swap stories about their wilder sexual encounters. But what is fiction and what is fact in these wild erotic exploits? Can we believe the tales these women are telling?